Per capita GHG emissions by country (w/ Sask. shown for comparison)

The following chart shows Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, per capita, for all countries of the world. The Dutch Antilles leads due primarily to a large refinery on the island of Curaçao. If Saskatchewan was a country, it would be #2 with 67.1 tonnes per person. The World's lowest emissions are recorded for Tuvalu in the South Pacific.

The two charts speaks for themselves nonetheless a couple of points are of note.

The first is that Saskatchewan's per capita emissions are 13.7 times greater than the world average and more than four times as high as Canada's. Proponents of the status quo will note that Saskatchewan is a major oil and gas producing region. However Saskatchewan's per capita production of crude oil and natural gas (27.4 tonnes of oil equivalent - TOE) is only 23 percent more than that of Saudi Arabia (22.3 TOE) and is substantially less than Norway's (36.1 TOE) and Alberta's (64.2 TOE). FYI Alberta's per capita GHG emissions are slightly less than Saskatchewan's.For more on oil & gas production data.

The second point of note is Germany. It is an advanced economy which , despite its relatively small size, is heavily industrialized: it has the world's third largest share of merchandise exports (after China and the US). Nonetheless it also has GHG emissions which are more than seven times lower than Saskatchewan's.

Why should anyone care about carbon emissions? We are moving rapidly to a carbon-constrained World. In that World GHG emitters will have to pay for those emissions. No global price has yet been set nonetheless it seems reasonable to assume that in the not-too-distant future GHGs will attract a price of about $20 per tonne.